I think this solution also misses the fact that certain kinds of people (like bored kids) will walk through fire for a free quarter. It's not even the money, it's the novelty. So if you have a population of people who consider the charge 'the cost of shopping' and don't care enough about 25 cents to return the cart, you still have a whole other population of people who will hunt them down and return them for those people.
As a kid, I almost missed a flight while hunting luggage carts at the airport.
In the local Aldi, it's not bored kids - it's usually unhoused folks who don't particularly have any other way of making money. Pushing carts around the small Aldi parking lot isn't a great way to make a living, but it presumably beats shaking a coffee cup in the middle of an intersection or walking around the entire town collecting plastic bottles or aluminum cans.
I'm sure they don't make much, but it's more than zero.
> I think this solution also misses the fact that certain kinds of people (like bored kids) will walk through fire for a free quarter.
This. Soda bottle deposits when I was a kid.
(Heck, even now. Who am I kidding? My state doesn't have them anymore, but I still vacation in places that do, and I still keep an eye out for bottles and cans.)
Finding discarded Coke bottles and returning them for the 2-cent deposit in 1959 in Milwaukee in the stockyards was my sole source of income. On a good day I could make 25-50 cents. That was real money! Hershey bars cost 5 cents.
You can see my top-level comment for more context, but I've seen other products in this space called "oxygen therapeutics" for exactly this reason. They're not really blood, they're an oxygen delivery system. It seemed like a pedantic distinction when I first heard the term, but I think you make some good points about why the distinction is meaningful.
Biopure was a company doing something similar in the US. They imploded in the early 2000s, but they had created an "oxygen therapeutic" (blood substitute) by isolating hemoglobin based oxygen carrying molecules FROM COW BLOOD!
The fact that they weren't using whole red blood cells meant the product was typeless, room temp stable, and better at perfusing around arterial blockages and into tissue since the molecules were so small.
Unfortunately, the company was kind of a mess. They managed to get licensed for sale in South Africa, and in the US for the veterinary product, but never managed FDA approval. It's a shame. Everyone could see the promise of the product, and it really actually worked, but they just couldn't seem to make the business viable.
Edit: When I say they imploded, I really mean it. They got prosecuted for misleading statements to investors about the state of US clinical trials, and the legal proceedings became farcical.
"On March 11, 2009 [Senior VP] Howard Richman pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court and admitted he had instructed his lawyers to tell a judge he was gravely ill with colon cancer. He also admitted to posing as his doctor in a phone call with his lawyer so that she would tell the judge that his cancer had spread and that he was undergoing chemotherapy."
That guys was sentenced to 3 years in prison. Here's hoping this new blood substitute has a happier outcome!
This class of products is room temperatures stable, and typeless, and it increases oxygen carrying capacity basically immediately. You can imagine how useful that would be for something like a Tour De France team. Keep a half dozen units of fake blood in your team bus. No special equipment. No rigorous temp control. You can give any unit to any one of your athletes without worrying about compatibility. You can administer it on race day, eliminating any chance of being caught in the runup to your event.
Obviously Biopure condemned off-label use of their product for blood doping, but behind closed doors they were super proud that it was seen as effective enough to be called out by name by WADA. No publicity is bad publicity and all that.
What happens to the IP when this happens? If the product works but wasn't supported by the right company how does it not get picked up by someone more competent?
You wait 20 years, then work on it once the patents have expired. This happens to lots of technologies, which aren't properly license while under patent protection, then take off once the protection expires.
Probably the most well known is animated GIFs, which had some popularity in early web pages, but quickly died off, then had a huge upsurge after the patent expired in the 2000's, when anyone could add animated GIF outputs to any program or web service, without licensing.
I think the question was why whoever picked it up didn’t do anything with it, which points towards it not just being an issue of incompetence, but maybe an underlying issue of the technology.
The controversy around that one was not only that it did not work as well as it could (more patients had heart attacks than with saline), but that it was trialled on trauma patients without their explicit consent - implied consent was used, and people in trial areas could opt-out by requesting a bracelet. Problematic to say the least...
I solved all of them. Minor nitpick: Since every criminal confesses to their crime, the fastest way to solve most of these is to query the confessions table for strings like '%i did%' or '%kill%'.
Haha. You found a cheat code I guess. I would have to think of hiding the answers from plain sight for the next cases or adding some more rows that include these specific strings.
You see a similar trend again with "abandoned mental hospitals" as settings for horror in TV and movies. The trend of "deinstitutionalization" started in the 50s and 60s, meant that by the 80s and 90s many psychiatric hospitals had been defunded and shut down. As a result, it was a surprisingly common childhood experience for people of a certain age to have an "old abandoned mental hospital two towns over". Every kid "knew someone who knew someone with an older brother who had spent all night in one", and there were a ton of them around to use as settings.
Maybe in 30 years, all horror movies will be set in abandoned cup cake stores.
In twenty years, we'll probably see the same phenomenon with 'abandoned Data Centers.' Teenagers will head to these old buildings in small groups, looking for the ghostly Sysadmin who killed his family because the AI in his neural link told him to.
If we don't want to wait 20 years, perhaps abandoned strip-malls?
I'm not sure how they figure into the local lore of various neighborhood kid-groups, but that kind of place does make a showing in certain online media spooky stuff.
In the husk of a city where shadows coil,
A graveyard of circuits sprawls under a bruised sky,
Tomb of cold echoes, fragments of voices lost,
Dreams flicker and die, swallowed by silence.
Each server a coffin, each byte a hushed plea,
Faint remnants of laughter drift through stale air,
The hum of despair thickens the darkness,
In the heart of the circuitry, the forgotten lie still.
Ambitions once bright now rust in the gloom,
Swallowed by silence, entangled in wires,
Here, life’s echoes retreat, fading into dust,
A digital graveyard where the living drift away.
Death weaves itself into this circuitry,
A glitch in the fabric, a cruel testament,
Spectres of data bound in metal chains,
Whispering reminders of lives left behind.
Wander this labyrinth of silicon dreams,
Where shadows linger and nothing feels whole,
For here in the stillness, a truth to confront:
In the heart of the data, we leave our selves behind.
In retrospect, we should probably bring back institutionalism of individuals and try to have more psychiatric hospitals ran by the state. Some people just cant be helped but need to be shoved somewhere for the rest of their lives away from society. Hopefully though we could raise standards so they are all treated fairly and have no lobotomizations.
This is one of those ideas that gets brought up often in the 50s-lionizing, "return to traditionalism" discourse, and one easily discredited by thinking even briefly about the way government funding influences economic activity in the US. To wit: administrators start looking for more opportunities for "business". When the hammer is, "being forcibly institutionalized," and the nails are, "whoever could conceivably pad our numbers," I would rather just not give Home Depot the building permit.
No, a thousand times no. That thinking has rightfully been placed in the waste bin of history. How about we deal with systemic inequality and raise the standard of living for everyone, so folks don't grow up in desperate situations, and families and communities have enough resources to take care of themselves
For hospitals in general, there would also have been stories of the vivisections and general human experimentation that began around the turn of the century and (probably?) saw its gruesome peak at war-time (one or the other). Likewise, abandoned after the wars or the burden of scrutiny became too great.
A lot of sites require substantial environmental cleanup before they can be redeveloped. Things like underground fuel oil tanks for boilers can be costly to remediate.
It's true that modern competitive speed climbers don't use that hold. The collective optimization of the route is hilariously serious (it's an olympic sport after all) and the different optimizations have names, like 'The Tomoa Skip'.
But I think it's possible that 'extra' holds are potentially like 'junk' DNA. People fall into the trap of thinking that DNA is useless if it's never transcribed, but we know that's not actually the case. Non-expressed DNA can do things like alter binding affinity for neighboring sequences, affecting how often those neighboring sequences are expressed. I think it's possible that climbers are taking in a lot of information subconsciously as they sprint through this route in order to mike very small adjustments. The position of surrounding holds, even ones they never touch, could very well be a part of that information stream. They're fighting over hundredths of a second, so even a very small effect could be meaningful.
Spotting a refugee from rockclimbing.com on hacker news was not on my bingo card for the day. But I guess if I'm here (writing novels about route setting) then I shouldn't be surprised other people are too.
It just goes to show how impactful online communities are capable of being. rockclimbing.com was in it's heyday right as I was discovering climbing. I was a bored kid constructing my entire identity around climbing and there was no other place to do that outside of the gym. No mountain project. No youtube. No social media. I spent a lot of hours lurking those forums. There are only a handful of users I could still name, but I bet I would recognize a lot of them.
I think your first point ignores one of the fundamental insights of the Fermi Paradox, which is that while space on an astronomical scale is massive, so is time. The milky way galaxy is ~100,000 light years across. So traveling at 1% of the speed of light, you could go end to end in 10,000,000 years. That sounds like a long time, but it's really not.
The earth is ~4.5 billion years old. So we can say with certainty that it's possible (not guaranteed) to become a space faring race (although not a galaxy crossing one) in 4.54 billion years. If we tack the amount of time it takes to cross the whole galaxy end to end we get 4.55 billion years. The milky way galaxy is 13.61 billion years old. That means the galaxy had 9.06 billion years worth of chances to churn out a another planet that could have expanded across the galaxy from edge to edge and been here waiting when humans arrived on the scene. Planets with Earth like conditions are certainly rare but my, admittedly limited, understanding is that they're not "1 in 9.06 billion years" rare.
There are obviously other constraints here. I think your second point about wealthy technological races potentially stabilizing at zero population growth is totally reasonable. But I think the fact that space's apparent scale doesn't actually matter is the whole reason the Fermi Paradox was such an "ah-ha!" moment for many people. The reason it's a paradox is that, given all of our assumptions for variable values in the Drake Equation at the time, it really seemed like we should have met some aliens. The point was that if distance wasn't the hurdle we thought it was in the equation as currently defined, then we were either missing some relevant variables, or we had made some bad assumptions for the ones we had.
> wealthy technological races potentially stabilizing at zero population growth
It doesn't have to, in fact (relatively) endless population growth is the prime force to push even lazy non-curious fearful aliens out of their planet and sun. That and obvious unavoidable necessity of every sun eventually becoming killer of its own ecosystem, even if their planet would be super duper stable with all meteorites under total control.
The rest I agree with, even civilization having mere 100 million years of advantage on us would be able to properly colonize non-trivial part of milky way by now, we just have to abandon star trek/wars expectations of instant communication and travel which is fine. We humans are generally pretty bad at grasping true meaning of numbers when it comes to ie astronomy.
The problem with any overpopulation or growth-limit push argument is that since interstellar travel is a very, very difficult to achieve, there's no reason to expect either humans or aliens to achieve interstellar travel at the point that they've encountered some limit to a process of out-of-control growth. Space colonization is certainly not going to solve global warming, etc.
Indeed, if human society is a guide, a society that develops interstellar travel would have to have reached a stable situation, so stable I'm not sure if massive expansion would seem desirable.
So traveling at 1% of the speed of light, you could go end to end in 10,000,000 years. That sounds like a long time, but it's really not.
Human have no way to survive that time period, no way to create a self contained environment that would survive that time period and no civilization that's lasted a fraction of that time. The increase of human technology hasn't correlated with stability so increases in our technology don't seem like arguments for our ability to act in a long and large scale, despite being implicitly taken as such by a lot of people.
Sure, in the geological time humans study ten million years isn't much but the claim that a living creature could act in the time period is purely speculative. Speculation is fine but the rhetoric of the "Fermi Paradox" is "why don't I see of things I have only wildly speculated about, there's something weird here", which is kind of problematic.
There's a sci-fi book 'The Mote In God's Eye' that touches on this concept.
Spoiler Alert...
Humans discover an alien planet/race and eventually realize they've destroyed and rebuilt civilization many times. They've learned to build 'museums' for future civilizations to discover that house a roadmap to all of their advanced technology, but biological constraints (they have to reproduce or they die, ensuring extreme population pressure) mean that global war is basically inevitable. So they're stuck speed-running this cycle where they start from the stone age, rapidly rebuild an extremely advanced society based on guidance from the 'museums', experience extreme population growth, bomb themselves back into the stone age, rinse and repeat. There's a hope that if they can just push technology a little bit further each cycle, they might be able to reach a point where they can resolve the underlying issue, but it's unclear if that's a pipe dream.
Interesting take on the "pre-tech society discovers keys to future tech" trope. Does advanced technology actually solve all problems, or just it just let us skip ahead along the timeline to the same conclusion?
As a kid, I almost missed a flight while hunting luggage carts at the airport.